What's The Healthiest Vegetable?

Reader question: What is the single best vegetable I should be eating on a regular basis, and what’s the easiest way to prepare it properly?

Ashley’s answer: No way! Not going to do this. It's impossible to pick just one as the “best.” For optimal health, we need all veggies in our lives—or at least one of each color of the rainbow. There is no room for perfection (i.e. “best”) when it comes to nutrition. Those who pick one vegetable or one fruit or one nut either have a vested interest in that food’s success, or they don’t have a full understanding of our body’s physiology. Your body needs variety so that you don’t get bored, certainly, also to ensure that we get all the nutrients it needs. Even the tiniest nutrients matter.

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In terms of preparing vegetables, I typically recommend making them how you like them to taste, but many vegetables are great raw, and others do better when heat and water breakdown some of their built-in self-protective mechanisms. An easy and healthy way to cook vegetables is the vapor cooking technique, which only uses a few drops of water and keeps your cooked veggies as full of nutrients as possible.

Chewing over a food quandary? Send it to AskAshley@Prevention.com

Ashley Koff is a registered dietitian, Qualitarian, nutrition expert, and co-author of Mom Energy: A Simple Plan to Live Fully Charged(Hay House; 2011)as well as Recipes for IBS (Fair Winds Press; 2007).